Why yet another Spring Boot starter

The idea came when a friend asked for a starter Java app to which he could move his existing PHP-based REST API. As a Java developer without experience in Spring Boot, I wanted to learn about it.

This project has examples for many of the features used in modern applications:

• Spring Boot is very popular
• gradle
• Database access
• Unit tests
• Automatic REST API documentation
• Operations friendly
• Making an external API call
• Logging
• Exception handling

Software used

• Spring Boot
• gradle 4.6 with wrapper
• MariaDB for the database interactions
• Mockito for unit tests
• Swagger 2 for automatic REST API documentation
• Lombok for automatic getters and setters
• Typicode provides Fake Online REST API for Testing and Prototyping

Spring Boot features used in this starter

• Spring Web MVC for the REST API
• Spring Test to use Spring's testing features
• Actuator jar added for metrics and other production-ready features, like health checks
• Logging - Spring Boot uses logback internally
• Custom exception handling

SQL to create the table used by this app

drop table test.mydata;

create table test.mydata (
 id int not null,
 name varchar(200) not null,
 primary key(id)
);

insert into test.mydata values (1, 'one');
insert into test.mydata values (2, 'two');
insert into test.mydata values (3, 'three');
insert into test.mydata values (4, 'four');

commit;

select count(*)
from test.mydata;

select *
from test.mydata;

To run the app

• Clone the project
• Look at property spring.datasource.url in application.properties
• Create a schema named test, or update the schema name to your own schema
• Run above SQL, changing schema name if needed
• cd to the project directory
• Clean, build the project, and run tests: ./gradlew clean build
• Run the app: java -jar build/libs/spring-boot-rest-0.1.0.jar

Try it out

• View the Swagger REST API docs page
• List numbers
  • http://localhost:8080/myapp/numbers
  • curl -X GET -H "Accept: application/json" http://localhost:8080/myapp/numbers
• Update one or more numbers
  • curl -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -X PUT -d '{"numbers": [{"id": 1, "name": "Oneone"}]}' http://localhost:8080/myapp/numbers
• Create one or more numbers
  • curl -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -X POST -d '{"numbers": [{"id": 12, "name": "Twelve"}]}' http://localhost:8080/myapp/numbers
• Delete a number
  • curl -X DELETE http://localhost:8080/myapp/numbers/1
• Call an external REST API
  • curl -X GET -H "Accept: application/json" http://localhost:8080/myapp/externalApiCall/5

A note of thanks

Thanks to all developers out there who I continue to learn so much from.